Facebook Deploys Robots to Save Blu-ray From Extinction
As those one billion users generate increasingly enormous amounts of data — an endless stream of status posts, likes, comments, photos, and videos — the team of engineers working under Facebook vice president of infrastructure engineering Jay Parikh are always looking for ways to more efficiently store all this digital information. With tongue in cheek, they call themselves “Jay’s commandos,” and their latest project is to move some of the older Facebook data onto Blu-ray, which is significantly cheaper than hard disks and flash and better suited to longterm storage. The robotic arms will help move the discs to and from the drives where the data is written and retrieved. Yes, this is a rather slow process compared to storing stuff on hard disk or flash, but it will only be used with data that rarely gets accessed, like very old photos.
Facebook calls it cold storage, and it’s yet another way that the giants of the web are pushing data center design into the future, seeking more efficient ways of processing and, yes, storing your data. It could also signal a larger movement towards the use of robotics in the data center, but at the same time, Facebook is venturing into the past with this rather surprising project. Just when the Blu-ray seemed to be on the way out — undercut by Netflix and other services that stream movies over the internet — another part of the internet has thrown it a lifeline.
See the full story here: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/02/facebook-robots/